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Cognitive style and scientific process skills in 10-year-old children

Watters, James J. (1993) Cognitive style and scientific process skills in 10-year-old children. In Proceedings Annual Conference of the Australasian Science Educators’ Research Association.

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Abstract

This research explored the scientific reasoning demonstrated by 10-year old students. The results of this study indicate that the Luria model, derived from neuropsychological theory, incorporating information processing dimensions of simultaneous and successive synthesis predicts significant achievement by 10-year-old children in tasks identifiable with scientific reasoning. These results compliment previous findings with 7-year-old children (Watters, 1992), 10 year-old-children (Watters & English, 1993) and with Grade 12 children (Angus, 1984) where it was shown that subjects with high simultaneous processing scores were proficient at syllogistic reasoning. Despite the substantial differences in the nature of the two problem solving tasks their solution appears to depend on similar cognitive processes. The Science Puzzle task is complex in that some questions involved interpretation of visually presented problems, others required interpretation of tables or graphs while some were traditional verbal questions typical of many science quizzes.

Item Type:Conference Paper
Status:Unpublished
Keywords:Alex Luria; simultaneous; successive; scientific reasoning; problem solving; science education;
Subjects:Subjects UNSPECIFIED
ID Code:1704
Deposited By:Watters, James J
Deposited On:24 June 2005
Copyright Owner:Copyright 1993 (please consult author)